Alfresco vs. IBM Enterprise Content Manager

If you have regulatory or business needs that require saving email into Alfresco and you are using Outlook for Mac, you may need to perform significant customization to make it work. Additionally, if you will have users that will be members to a large numbers of sites over time, you need to thoroughly explore what functionality will be degraded or lost and how to mitigate the impact. Other than these two scenarios, I cannot think of any scenarios where Alfresco would not be well suited to an organization's needs.

Incentivized

Self-hosted IBM ECM Solutions are appropriate for any large organization with substantial internal infrastructure management teams and a commitment to training their staff. Other organizations should consider the Cloud based offerings.

Incentivized

• Integration with other applications, namely Drupal and Moodle, was simple and works beautifully.
• The UI is intuitive, clean, and friendly. Users have required little training for basic functionality.
• We have been pleased with the overall system performance of Alfresco Enterprise Content Management.

Incentivized

• Speaking of IBM Case Manager in particular, we believe that just about every business process involving the effort of knowledge workers can be enhanced and automated using IBM Case Manager. If a process or set of tasks requires the judgment, decision-making skills, and experience of a knowledge worker, then the process can be configured for IBM Case Manager. If the process is dynamic and requires flexibility such that the business outcome depends upon the choices and decisions made during the process, then IBM Case Manager is the ideal solution for automation, tracking, and collaboration of such work.
• With regards to Content Management, we are particularly fond of and adept at utilizing both IBM Content Collector, IBM Classification Manager, and IBM Enterprise Records. As business communications have changed over the last 20 years, the growth of digital content housed within the burgeoning storage silos located throughout a company's infrastructure has swelled to nearly unmanageable levels. This impacts them in numerous ways; from the direct costs associated with ever increasing storage, to the unknowable costs associated with the legal liability of content residing on their systems, to the lost opportunity of un-mined customer data residing on their systems. All of these impacts can be mitigated by the application of IBM Content Management and Content Analytics.
• To me personally, I believe the greatest strength of products like these are their immense configurability. Depending upon the business requirements of the customer, systems such as those mentioned above can be configured in almost inexhaustible arrangements to accomplish just about any task that can be imagined - all to satisfy the needs and requirements of the demands of the business. From collecting email from mail servers and evaluating it for its context, not just it's content, in order to determine its worth to the organization, to creating File Plans for storing content in a smart repository which makes possible content lifecycle management and defensible disposal, IBM just does this better than any other products I am familiar with.

Incentivized

• Alfresco Process Services and Alfresco Application Development Framework integration makes for best functionality/application of ECM.
• Use case alignment - Marketing content and documentation of specific business requirements and user stories being available as reference material/documentation.
• Integration with multiple silos for content.

Incentivized

• As enterprise and mid-market systems go, the price is highly competitive (especially when you consider what's included in the license). That said, this product is not accessible for small businesses as a self hosted solution. The "Navigator on Cloud" solution is much more accessible, but gives less control over data.
• To get all the features, there are many moving parts. For large enterprises, this is no problem, and the cloud solution obviates most of these concerns.

Incentivized

As per the current market and the line of products that are available for content and document management system, Alfresco is a very good option compared to other systems in terms of features and cost. Plus the community support is great. Also since the product is open source, it can be extended or understood in a better way.

Incentivized

There is no plan to change ECM at organizational level. Replacing products and changing custom applications involves lot of effort

Incentivized

The UI is very intuitive, most of our users figure out how to use the platform by themselves, so there's not much training needed.

You can upload files by using the web drag and drop, WebDAV, FTP, and more.

Most of the platform already works as-is so you can just deploy it using Docker and it's mostly ready to go.

Incentivized

The end-user experience is excellent. The Administration experience needs some more work.

Incentivized

I am not big fan of Alfresco Content Services' support; it works on its own speed and sometimes it becomes challenging to achieve business needs. However, I appreciate regular delivery of security patches and updates

Incentivized

Process was relatively smooth and overall, downtime minimal. MSI was very responsive to our needs and made the transition easier than it otherwise might have been.

Incentivized

The integration is very easy and can be done with minimal time. The features like sending email, inbuilt integration with CAMEl, MULE, BOX, etc. In addition to this, the adoption of activiti-7 (the microservice version) wins the race against other tools. As the infrastructure and application modules can be deployed independently.

Incentivized

Our relationship with IBM is long standing. We have been Gold Partners for some time and are viewed by many internal groups as their Go To partner for large ECM deployments. Most of our systems engineers hold multiple certifications as solutions developers. Our clients are national and international. The support we receive from IBM has been excellent and our partnership with them on numerous projects has been excellent.

Incentivized

• It definitely has a positive ROI in the overall business, as content management has become easier and more centralized.
• Video and image content management has become a major plus, as they play an important role in dynamic digital marketing. Once the code is written to accommodate image and videos, we can change this content any time depending on the season of the year, what products we are looking to market, and to what type of clients.
• It helps with easy control of the system with the business teams rather than having control with the technology teams. Hence it makes it easy to customize and make changes at any time. This also reduces the overlap that technology has with business and helps treat both of them as separate entities.

Incentivized

• After using the IBM ECM in HR department the productivity of the department increased
• There are lot of cost savings because of eliminating the need to maintain physical documents

Incentivized